AI Research Fellowship – Applied Security

About the role

Cogent’s AI Research Fellowship is an early‑career, full‑time track for recent or soon‑to‑graduate PhDs who want to translate cutting‑edge research into production‑grade security systems. Fellows will work at the intersection of AI, formal methods, and cybersecurity to build autonomous, verifiable security agents.

Key responsibilities

• Define and pursue a research direction at the intersection of AI and formal methods, such as auto‑formalizing intent into machine‑checkable specifications, certificate‑producing code generation, AI‑assisted proof in Lean, runtime verification of agent tool calls, or natural‑language‑to‑policy synthesis.
• Take ideas end‑to‑end, from prototype to systems running against real customer workloads.
• Partner with applied AI, agent, and platform engineers to translate research advances into production capabilities.
• Work with design partners and security leaders to ground the work in the workflows security engineers actually run.
• Build evaluation harnesses and benchmarks that capture what “verified‑correct” or “policy‑compliant” means in messy, real‑world security environments.
• Iterate quickly, update your approach when results indicate a better path, and share findings internally and at external venues.

Required profile

• Research experience in formal methods, program analysis, programming languages, agentic AI for code reasoning, or runtime verification.
• Strong publication record in top conferences or journals, or comparable open‑source/artifact contributions.
• Recently completed PhD in Computer Science or a closely related field (or expected soon).
• Proven engineering ability, fluency in a major programming language and the judgment to mature a prototype into a production‑ready system.
• Independent, self‑starting mindset, comfortable operating in ambiguous settings and excited about Cogent’s mission.

Required skills

• Formal methods
• Program analysis
• Programming languages
• Agentic AI for code reasoning
• Runtime verification
• Lean theorem prover
• Proficiency in a major programming language (e.g., Python, C++)

What we offer

• Base salary range $100,000 – $300,000 annually, with potential variable compensation, equity and comprehensive benefits.
• Opportunity to move research from paper to production in a fast‑growing applied AI lab backed by Greylock.